History
"If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday" (Pearl Buck)
At St Bernadette's we aim to ignite curiosity and critical thinking about our identity, environment and community - past and present, local and global. History allows the pupils to understand the process of change, the diversity of societies and the complexity of human development. It provides a context in which to understand ourselves and others.
Our curriculum provides pupils with the chronological knowledge to place their learning in context both in history and across other subjects. We promote the core historical skills of research and gathering information but also the disciplinary knowledge of how historians study the past and construct accounts. We ensure pupils have the coherence of knowledge that is essential to understanding new material and substantive concepts such as invasion, trade and empire.
From this fundamental base of knowledge pupils can develop disciplinary thinking, exploring how and why historians construct different interpretations of the past and attribute significance to topics or events. This gives pupils the opportunities to ask perceptive questions, think critically and develop their own arguments and judgements. Pupils gain an understanding of the complexity of the past and the constructed, contested nature of History.